‘Want to know something?’ Billy said, thrusting his sneering face close to mine. ‘I’m enjoying this.’
I saved my breath.
He put the barrel of his revolver very carefully against my skin, laying it flat along a rib just above the existing cut. Then he pushed me round until I was half facing the wall he had made of the hay bales. ‘Keep still,’ he said. He drew the revolver four inches backwards with the barrel still touching me and pulled the trigger. At such close quarters, without the silencer, the shot was a crashing explosion. The bullet sliced through the skin over my ribs and embedded itself in the wall of hay. The spit of flame from the barrel scorched in its wake. In the box behind me, the startled mares began making a fuss. It would create a handy diversion, I thought, if they were frightened into dropping their foals.
Patrick was on his feet, aghast and swaying. I heard him shouting something unintelligible to Billy, and Billy shouting back, ‘Only you can stop it, mate.’
‘Patrick,’ I yelled. ‘Go to Milan.’
‘That’s bloody enough,’ Billy said. He put his gun back on my side, as before. ‘Keep still.’
Yardman couldn’t afford me dead until Patrick had flown where they wanted. I was all for staying alive as long as possible, and jerking around in the circumstances could cut me off short. I did as Billy said, and kept still. He pulled the trigger.
The flash, the crash, the burn, as before.
I looked down at myself, but I couldn’t see clearly because of the angle. There were three long furrows now, parallel and fiery. The top two were beginning to bleed.
Patrick sat down heavily as if his knees had given way and put his hands over his eyes. Yardman was talking to him, clearly urging him to save me any more. Billy wasn’t for waiting. He put his gun in position, told me to keep still, and shot.
Whether he intended it or not, that one went deeper, closer to the bone. The force of it spun me round hard against the mares’ box and wrenched my arms, and my feet stumbled as I tried to keep my balance. The mares whinnied and skittered around, but on the whole they were getting less agitated, not more. A pity.
I had shut my eyes, that time. I opened them slowly to see Patrick and Yardman much nearer, only eight feet away on the far side of the flattened box. Patrick was staring with unreassuring horror at Billy’s straight lines. Too soft-hearted, I thought despairingly. The only chance we had was for him to leave Billy to get on with it and go and turn back to Milan. We weren’t much more than half an hour out. In half an hour we could be back. Half an hour of this...
I swallowed and ran my tongue round my dry lips.
‘If you go where they say,’ I said urgently to Patrick, ‘they will kill us all.’
He didn’t believe it. It wasn’t in his nature to believe it. He listened to Yardman instead.
‘Don’t be silly, my dear boy. Of course we won’t kill you. You will land, we will disembark, and you can all fly off again, perfectly free.’
‘Patrick,’ I said desperately. ‘Go to Milan.’
Billy put his gun along my ribs.
‘How long do you think he can keep still?’ he asked, as if with genuine interest. ‘What’ll you bet?’
I tried to say, ‘They shot Gabriella,’ but Billy was waiting for that. I got the first two words out but he pulled the trigger as I started her name, and the rest of it got lost in the explosion and my own gasping breath.
When I opened my eyes that time, Patrick and Yardman had gone.
For a little while I clung to a distant hope that Patrick would turn back, but Billy merely blew across the top of his hot revolver and laughed at me, and when the plane banked it was to the left, and not a one eighty degree turn. After he had straightened out I looked at the acute angle of the late afternoon sun as it sliced forwards in narrow slivers of brilliance through the row of oval windows on my right.
No surprise, I thought drearily.
We were going east.
Billy had a pocket full of bullets. He sat on the flattened box, feeding his gun. The revolving cylinder broke out sideways with its axis still in line with the barrel, and an ejector rod, pushed back towards the butt, had lifted the spent cartridges out into his hand. The empty cases now lay beside him in a cluster, rolling slightly on their rims. When all the chambers were full again he snapped the gun shut and fondled it. His eyes suddenly switched up to me, the wide stare full of malice.
‘Stinking earl,’ he said.
A la lanterne, I thought tiredly. And all that jazz.
He stood up suddenly and spoke fiercely, with some sort of inner rage.
‘I’ll make you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Ask.’
‘Ask what?’
‘Something... anything. I’ll make you bloody well ask me for something.’
I said nothing.
‘Ask,’ he said savagely.
I stared past him as if he wasn’t there. Fights, I thought with some chill, weren’t always physical.
‘All right,’ he said abruptly. ‘All right. You’ll ask in the end. You bloody sodding well will.’
I didn’t feel sure enough to say I bloody sodding well wouldn’t. The taunting sneer reappeared on his face, without the same infallible confidence perhaps, but none the less dangerous for that. He nodded sharply, and went off along the alleyway towards the nose, where I hoped he’d stay.
I watched the chips of sunshine grow smaller and tried to concentrate on working out our course, more for distraction than from any hope of needing the information for a return journey. The bullets had hurt enough when Billy fired them, but the burns, as burns do, had hotted up afterwards. The force generated inside the barrel of a pistol was, if I remembered correctly, somewhere in the region of five tons. A bullet left a revolver at a rate of approximately seven hundred feet per second and if not stopped carried about five hundred yards. The explosion which drove the bullet spinning on its way also shot out flames, smoke, hot propulsive gases and burning particles of gunpowder, and at close quarters they made a very dirty mess. Knowing these charming facts was of no comfort at all. The whole ruddy area simply burnt and went on burning, as if someone had stood an electric iron on it and had forgotten to switch off.
After Billy went away it was about an hour before I saw anyone again, and then it was Alf. He shuffled into my sight round the corner of the box I was tied to, and stood looking at me with one of the disposable mugs in his hand. His lined old face was, as usual, without expression.
‘Alf,’ I shouted. ‘Untie me.’
There wasn’t anywhere to run to. I just wanted to sit down. But Alf either couldn’t hear, or wouldn’t. He looked unhurriedly at my ribs, a sight which as far as I could see produced no reaction in him at all. But something must have stirred somewhere, because he took a slow step forward, and being careful not to touch me, lifted his mug. It had ‘Alf’ in red where Mike had written it that morning, in that distant sane and safe lost world of normality.
‘Want some?’ he said.
I nodded, half afraid he’d pour it out on the floor, as Billy would have done; but he held it up to my mouth, and let me finish it all. Lukewarm, oversweet neo-coffee. The best drink I ever had.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He nodded, produced the nearest he could do to a smile, and shuffled away again. Not an ally. A non-combatant, rather.
More time passed. I couldn’t see my watch or trust my judgment, but I would have guessed it was getting on for two hours since we had turned. I had lost all sense of direction. The sun had gone, and we were travelling into dusk. Inside the cabin the air grew colder. I would have liked to have had my shirt on properly, not to mention a jersey, but the mares behind my back provided enough warmth to keep me from shivering. On a full load in that cramped plane eight horses generated a summer’s day even with icing conditions outside, and we seldom needed the cabin heaters. It was far too much to hope in the circumstances that Patrick would think of switching them on.